So Apple has done what’s needed to jumpstart speculation about what is coming from the company for the rest of the year. Invitations have been sent to selected journalists for the June 5th WWDC keynote. As the rumors about the next iPhone continue to take shape, talk about macOS 10.13 and iOS 11 will begin to assume prominence. Will they be major upgrades, or simple refreshes with improved performance and a few dozen enhancements?

Regardless, Apple will make it seem as if there are going to be major changes, that Apple is poised to upend the technology industry yet again. But the real question is what sort of changes Apple really needs to make with its flagship system software. Is there anything seriously lacking on Macs that Apple needs to address, other than to make macOS faster and more stable? Unfortunately, releases have bred tons of criticisms about programming lapses, inconsistent performance,

And why does the listing for macOS Sierra at the App Store not include user reviews?

And, no, I couldn’t care less what name Apple uses this time. But what I do expect to see is a release version of the Apple File System (APFS), which offers loads of state-of-the-art file system features. These include snapshots and other capabilities that will no doubt result in all-new and more flexible Time Machine backup utility. I just wonder whether APFS will make it possible to create bootable Time Machine volumes.

With iOS 10.3, Apple has already launched APFS, and it doesn’t appear that it’s resulted in any serious compatibility issues. My wish list is relatively sparse. I’d like to see more flexible text editing capabilities, and perhaps some new ideas for iPad — and perhaps iPhone Plus — multitasking. If Apple hopes to make it easier to be productive on an iPad, iOS 10.4 might offer features that will help developers add important new features.

I’d be happy if you can just record audio and video from one app in another app, and maybe have more flexible access to the file system for creatives. That doesn’t mean iOS has to do things in the same way as macOS. I’d like to see bright ideas from Apple’s OS developers that I never thought about before.

But what about hardware?

With Apple’s assurances that they love Mac professionals, will there be a demonstration of the next Mac Pro? Showing off a product that won’t be out until early next year is not unheard of. Remember that the controversial 2013 Mac Pro was first launched at that year’s WWDC, even though it didn’t actually ship until late December. And, in fact, most users had to wait until early 2014 to receive product.

I suppose it’s also possible that there will be news about the 2017 iMac with professional features. If that’s the case, it could ship in late June, sporting more powerful processors and graphics, and perhaps with additional ports and other features that will make it possible for this all-in-one powerhouse to replace the Mac Pro for more users. I would anticipate the ability to run two external 5K displays.

Before I bought my original 27-inch iMac in late 2009, I had a Mac Pro. But I felt that, for my needs, the iMac was a better fit. But I also expect that the pro features will be available in optional configurations. You’ll see be able to buy the refreshed iMacs for the same prices as the current model, maybe even less.

There might even be a refreshed MacBook and Mac mini, but both products would be treated as afterthoughts. If they are launched at the WWDC, they would arrive with brief announcements at the June 5th keynote or just a press release.

While the Mac hasn’t received the treatment it ought to receive in recent years, staying the course with the rest of the announcements wouldn’t seem out of line.

That said, rumors about the next macOS and iOS are quite sparse so far. Maybe my aging memory is lacking, but I seem to recall more talk about these topics in earlier years. It doesn’t seem to be as much on the radar these days with all the talk about the iPhone 8, whether or not it’ll arrive on time, and new Mac hardware.

Oh yes, maybe there will be something from Apple to compete against the Amazon Echo. On the heels of comments from Apple’s marketing VP, Philip Schiller, that the Echo lacks a display, Amazon has introduced a model, the Echo Show, which offers just that. There’s no connection, of course. Obviously this new model has been under development for a while.

But to me, it resembles a low-end TV set that one might put in a kitchen or a patio setting. Yes, I realize it has a touchscreen and a camera and thus serves the function of a video phone. At $229.99, it seems to be a decent enough deal for those who care.

That said, it’s time for a reality check: Apple reportedly sold far more Apple Watches than Amazon sold Echos, yet the latter is thought to be a success, while the former is thought to are a failure. But an Apple alternative to an Echo would be a consumer product, and it would seem a better fit for early fall introduction, not fodder for a developer’s event.

For several months, we’ve been hearing the same old refrain: Apple is running into trouble gearing up for production of the mythical iPhone 8. As a result, it may indeed by announced at a September media event as expected, but won’t ship for months. This is the result of alleged various and sundry difficulties setting up production lines.

A corollary rumor is that Apple shares Samsung’s difficulty in getting a touchscreen-based version of its fingerprint sensor to work, and hence will place it on its backside, contradicting it’s user-friendly Touch ID approach. In other words, the same as the Samsung Galaxy S8. Indeed, some alleged schematics of this alleged iPhone design have been posted, but it’s obvious there’s no evidence they are genuine.

True, if the iPhone 8 — or 10th anniversary iPhone — is what it’s rumored to be, a brand new glass-based design with an edge-to-edge OLED display and other goodies, it’s possible there will  be production difficulties. Indeed, Apple does run into product shortages for a time with new products. The AirPods represent a recent example. The iPhone 7 Plus was also constrained, but that’s supposedly because Apple misjudged demand, and maybe that’s also true for the fancy wireless earphones.

So on the surface, the stories about production glitches do appear to be credible, except that such rumors are usually repeated every year with a brand new Apple gadget is expected. We don’t hear quite as many warnings of that sort with Samsung gear, and that doesn’t mean supplies aren’t constrained there too from time to time. It’s just not getting that much attention.

Now comes yet another claim about iPhone production efficiencies. This one emerges from a Chinese publication, Economic Daily News, which cites the supply chain in reporting that the production ramp is on track. An AP report claims that the new iPhone will be introduced in September and ship on time in October.

What this means is that Apple’s schedule will evidently be met. So if there’s any supply constraint, it would be the result of a higher-than-expected demand for the new hardware.

So what’s the truth?

Without any confirmation — which will not come from an official source until Apple actually demonstrates the next iPhone — it’s very much guesswork. For now it’s a matter of which sources you want to believe, and which ones should be ignored.

To be fair, it may be that the usual early production bottlenecks are being amplified to indicate the presence of a serious problem rather than a perfectly normal testing and setup process.

After all, Apple CEO Tim Cook is a supply chain genius, so such problems ought to be minor and of short duration. When production constrains occur, it may be mostly about underestimating demand, or just that Apple would prefer to have a product in somewhat short supply to make it seem more attractive, more popular. But that may be the sort of conspiracy theory that really doesn’t make practical sense. Why should Apple lose potential sales, or will more people buy something if it’s a little hard to get?

On the other hand, this sort of chatter merely helps promote an unrelated Apple product. First you read speculation about the specs and the design. Interspersed with those rumors are ones about alleged production hangups.

I wouldn’t assume that all these stories are somehow fed by Apple to fuel demand. It’s pretty clear the company cannot fully clamp down on stories from the supply chain. It’s too large to control fully. At best, they can cite the official corporate line, that Apple doesn’t talk about unreleased products. Except, of course, when they do, and that’s usually in keeping with a marketing plan to boost interest in something that has never been done before.

So you may indeed see a demonstration of the next Mac Pro at next month’s WWDC, with the promise of delivery early in 2018. But that isn’t based on any rumors or expectations. Since the next Mac Pro may be built in the U.S., same as its controversial predecessor, you won’t be hearing about it via the Asian supply chain. So Apple can surprise and amaze people without any advance warning that it’s happening.

It can indeed be a neat way to present a “one more thing,” something we don’t see from Apple all that often nowadays.

But I do not expect to see a demonstration of a new iPhone at the Apple developer event, even though one unnamed industry analyst made that prediction. One would think that someone who professes an expertise about an industry would have a modicum of common sense. Apple isn’t going to pre-announce a new product when that announcement will gut sales of current models. Consider what’s already happening. According to Cook, some of the slowdown in iPhone 7 sales is due to expectations about a newer, better model.

There will be exceptions, and recent disclosures about the next Mac Pro aren’t going to hurt sales of the current model any more than they are already being hurt. Apple has already confirmed that an all-new model is under development, and has been selling off the 2013 version at a sharply reduced price. The damage has already been done.

As far as the next iPhone is concerned, I’m eager to see how it all turns out, but I don’t take much of the current chatter about it seriously.

When the iPad debuted in 2010, it arrived with great fanfare. While Microsoft had touted tablets for years, they hadn’t gone anywhere beyond some vertical markets. So I recall that my wife’s former family doctor used them. They came in the form of a perfectly ordinary notebook computer with a touchscreen. But using them was an awkward process, no doubt because of an OS that wasn’t mobile savvy, and apps that required endless taps and swipes to make basic data entries.

Some say that tablets debuted in the 1968 sci-fi classic, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but they were essentially portable displays, not personal computers. A closer counterpart was the tablet used in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” But the ones used by Captain Picard and crew were mostly information devices, to check status and make simple entries. They weren’t used for basic text entry. The ship’s log and other documents were prepared by dictating to the ship’s onboard computer. So, in a sense, actress Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, as the voice of the Star Trek computer, was the first Siri.

But when Steve Jobs demonstrated the original iPad, he sat there dutifully typing on its touchscreen, boasting that the keyboard was large enough to enter text in comfort. But even his legendary reality distortion field wasn’t sufficient to convince people that typing on glass was better than typing on a real keyboard.

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When Steve Jobs originally debuted Apple’s Time Machine app in 2008, it was presented as a solution to one of the biggest problems with using a personal computer. Most people never do backups, and Jobs quoted some terribly poor percentages for the time, in the low double digits.

It wasn’t a surprise to me. Although I have rather elaborate backup schemes that I’ll mention in a moment, most people don’t bother.

So Apple made Time Machine basically about as simple as possible to help you set it up. Despite this, I’ve encountered more than a few Mac users over the years who never heard of it and, worse, still don’t do any backups.

Now the absolute easiest way to set it up is to mount a backup drive of some sort. You don’t need anything terribly expensive, and certainly not an SSD. A simple 1TB backup drive can be had for less than $50. It’ll connect to your Mac’s USB port. Of course, if you have a MacBook or the new MacBook Pro, you’ll need an adaptor unless that drive is USB-C.

Either way, there’s a Time Machine preference icon in the menu bar (unless you’ve turned off that option), and it’s also available in System Preferences. Normally it’ll ask you to choose a backup disk the first time you launch it, but you can set up the backup drive manually. The “Back Up Automatically” checkbox will start the backup whenever that drive is connected to your Mac. It doesn’t have to be full time. You can just plug it in and it’ll catch up.

The very first time a backup starts, it will catalog your Mac’s startup drive, and that can take a few hours to do. Normally backups are done every hour, and they’re incremental. This means that, after the first run, Time Machine will backup only the new or changed files. If the drive isn’t mounted, it’ll catch up soon as it’s inserted.

That’s the good thing. Once you spend a few seconds setting it up, you don’t have to think about it again until you have to use it. This is where Time Machine is most effective. Depending on the size of the backup drive, Time Machine will record multiple incremental backups. If you accidentally delete a file, and Time Machine already has it stored, you can easily recover it. Maybe you need to restore a file that you removed a week or a month ago. So long as there’s enough room on the backup media, it’ll probably be there if you’ve been using the app long enough.

The ability to travel through your Mac’s history and find and recover data is why it’s called Time Machine, and it has an interface that’s appropriate to its title. But it’s not a panacea, which is why I use several backup methods to satisfy my obsessive nature about such matters.

Apparently Time Machine doesn’t work with PC-formatted media, even though you can use one of those drives on a Mac. You have to format it as HFS+, which requires Disk Utility. Or simply get a drive formatted for the Mac. When you order a backup drive from a dealer, for example, look for a Mac compatible version to save that step, although it’s not much of a step.

There are some technical considerations, which essentially help save space. After a day, hourly backups are combined into single daily backups. Daily backups expire after 31 days. Weekly backups are stored until storage space is used up, after which the oldest sets are deleted.

To me, Time Machine’s biggest limitation is that you can’t boot from it. This sort of makes sense from a practical point of view, since your backup drive is filled with loads of incremental versions of files that would somehow have to be combined, on-the-fly, to allow you to use it as a temporary replacement for your Mac’s startup drive in case of a problem.

On the other hand, if you’re setting up a new Mac or a new drive via Apple’s Migration Assistant, you can restore from Time Machine.

Now Apple’s replacement for HFS+, Apple File System (APFS), may provide some alternate backup possibilities. It was officially released for iOS 10.3 a few weeks ago. The macOS version was introduced as a beta at last June’s WWDC with significant limitations, but may reach release form in time for this fall’s macOS upgrade.

For now, I have two external drives, but I use three backup schemes on my iMac.

So there’s a Time Machine backup set on one drive, and a clone backup courtesy of Carbon Copy Cloner on a second drive. A clone backup is run once every night, and it presents me with a duplicate of my iMac’s internal drive. The third backup is offsite for various reasons, the most important of which is to have a way to get back in business if something happens not just to my Mac, but to my home. You can consider the possibilities.

The offsite backup uses a service known as CrashPlan. I opted for a family plan, so the contents of my MacBook Pro and my son’s MacBook Air are also stored there. Yes, Grayson lives in Madrid, but location doesn’t matter when you’re using a cloud backup system.

Now Time Machine hasn’t received many updates over the years. Perhaps APFS will allow for creation of a bootable drive and other possibilities, but I am not well-versed on the technicalities. Time will tell.

When Jobs launched Time Machine nine years ago, he clearly hoped to address a serious problem with one of the most simple backup schemes ever. However, the more I talk to people about their backup scenarios, I still find that, by and large, there aren’t any. With all of Apple’s resources, surely they can devise a way to persuade people that they need to convert to the backup religion. For now, Apple doesn’t talk about it very much, and that’s unfortunate.